Cambridge Future Tech’s COO, Xavier Parkhouse-Parker was featured in TechRound’s shortlist of Successful University of Cambridge Alumni Entrepreneurs List. Along with Dr. Liz Zijing Li, Co-Founder CFT’s Venture Mimicrete.
Cambridge Future Tech – Xavier Parkhouse-Parker
Xavier Parkhouse-Parker is a serial entrepreneur and founder who started his first company at 15 and jumped in full time while pursuing an undergraduate degree. Xavier has led several startups with technologies such as AI, media, marketing and HR tech. Xavier holds a masters from the University of Cambridge. He has been featured in The Guardian, USA Today, Tech Nation and other publications and was one of CVC Capital Partners Young Innovators for 2017 and NACUE’s National Entrepreneur of the year for 2016.
Xavier is currently a Co-founder and COO of Cambridge Future Tech – a Deep Tech Venture Builder. Cambridge Future Tech is a Tech Venture Builder with a vision to help facilitate the next generation of Deep Tech innovation. They work to commercialise scientific discoveries, platform level innovations that fundamentally improve the way the world works.
Xavier has founded a number a number of startups and moved full-time with his ventures when he was an undergraduate. Since then he has started companies with technologies such as AI for use in media, marketing and HR tech. Immediately prior to Cambridge Future Tech, he helped to build a digital marketing company, ZapHub, with their marketing growing rapidly to land 50+ clients in the first 18 months.
He left ZapHub at the beginning of 2020 to focus on technology ventures, with Cambridge Future Tech (CFT) being the perfect company for him. CFT was founded along with colleagues from Cambridge Judge Business school after they repeatedly saw the same challenges faced by DeepTech founders. There is a gap in the support offered to academic founders in-between the University support and investors. CFT joins academic founders, who have developed a new innovative technology, as a co-founder in a business to commercialise that technology. CFT supports all aspects of the commercial running of a DeepTech venture from customer development, to finance and fundraising.
CFT currently has 3 helped to build ventures and following their successful fundraise in 2021, will build between 4-6 new deep tech ventures a year from 2022 onwards. Deep Tech startups have significantly different characteristics to a lot of other technologies and require a lot of diverse support from a very early stage. CFT provides this support and plans to help facilitate the next generation of deep tech ventures. Xavier remains excited to see the amazing companies he’ll build into the future.
Mimicrete – Dr. Liz Zijing Li
Infrastructure is the backbone of our modern society, enabling trade, powering businesses, and protecting cities from an increasingly unpredictable natural environment. For infrastructure themselves, the fact is, they all crack, no matter how carefully being stored or reinforced. Government must maintain or replace critical infrastructure: dams, bridges, roads, and tunnels, regularly and at great expense. In the UK alone we spend over 40 billion pounds every year maintaining and replacing damaged structures.
Can buildings “magically” heal the cracks like our skin? Dr, Liz Zijing Li developed a unique way to make this happen. This solution applies 3D printing technology and biomimetic designs to novel self-healing concrete, which mimics the human self-healing system and promises to reduce the costs of concrete production and maintenance. It increases the strength of concrete on day one and more than doubles its lifespan. The need to monitor and maintain infrastructure is reduced, and the extension in lifespan reduces the volume of concrete utilised in the overall built environment, in turn reducing the negative environmental impact of construction itself.
Dr. Liz Zijing Li has now converted this invention into innovation and co-founded MimiCrete Ltd-an advanced materials science start-up developing novel self-healing concrete. She previously studied PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and investigates innovative 3D printed models and fugitive ink manufacturing platforms for vascular self-healing construction materials. Representing the venture, she recently made into the final round of the PHBS-CJBS Global Pitch Competition and won the third prize.
MimiCrete Ltd helps the ‘’world’s most destructive material’’ to become significantly more sustainable and contributes to the global carbon neutral target.
